Walking the Labyrinth (3 page)

“Please register at the desk when you come in,” the woman said. A buzzer sounded, and Molly pushed open the front door.

The registration desk was to her left, past a bank of mailboxes. She went over and gave her name and Andrew Dodd’s, and the receptionist picked up the phone and punched a three-digit number.

Andrew Dodd seemed to be taking a great deal of time to get to the phone. Molly studied the lobby with its faded maroon carpets and plush worn couches, its round wooden table and wilting centerpiece. “Mr. Dodd says to go on up,” the receptionist said finally. “The elevators are through that hallway.”

She took the elevator to the third floor and rang the bell to Dodd’s apartment. Nothing happened. She rang again, then knocked. “In a minute,” Dodd’s voice said. “In a minute.” She heard something being dragged across the floor and then the door opened.

Andrew Dodd looked far older than her aunt Fentrice. His gray hair was sparse on top, long and uncombed over his shirt collar. He had white stubble on his face, and deep lines, almost like scars, running from his nose to the sides of his mouth. At least he had smiled once, Molly thought. The sound she had heard was his walker, which he leaned on heavily.

“Come in,” he said. “I’d offer you something but all I have is club soda.” The walker had wheels on its two front legs; he turned and pushed it toward the couch. “Sit down.”

Molly took an old wooden office chair in front of his desk. He sat heavily on the red and gold couch. “Allalie, is it?” he said. “Funny what you remember. I couldn’t tell you what I had for breakfast this morning but I can see those people as if it was yesterday. You look a little like them, come to think of it. ’Cept you don’t have the gap teeth.”

Molly tried not to show her surprise. Her aunt had insisted on braces to correct her teeth. “Fentrice Allalie is my great-aunt,” she said.

He nodded. “That explains it. You going to disappear now?”

“What?”

“Your great-aunt—she was a tricky one. She made me think she was Thorne, or Thorne made me think she was her—I never did get them straightened out. They gave me the best champagne of my life that night, and you know what? The next day I stopped drinking for good. Thirteen years of Prohibition didn’t do it, but they did. I’m getting thirsty just thinking about that champagne. Do you want a soda?”

“Sure. I’ll get it if you like.”

“No you don’t, missy. I can still take care of myself.” He held on to the walker and pulled himself laboriously to his feet, then moved to the kitchen.

A minute later he came back. The sodas rested on a tray attached to the top of the walker. “Give you a piece of advice, if you like,” Dodd said. “Don’t get old.”

Molly laughed. Dodd didn’t; perhaps it hadn’t been a joke. “What do you want to know about the Allalies? Writing a family history?”

“Something like that. What do you remember about them?”

“You read the article?” he asked. Molly nodded. “Did you see anything strange about it?”

She shook her head.

“It was all bullshit—pardon my French.” He grinned. Molly said nothing, waiting for him to go on. “My editor didn’t notice either, luckily. I practically made the whole thing up.”

“Why?”

“Why?” He took a sip of his soda. “You sure you’re not going to disappear? I went backstage to the trap room after the performance, and they gave me the runaround. No answers to my questions, lots of confusion …” He shook his head. “Fireworks, and music, and people dancing and laughing … I can still hear that damn song they sang. Couple years after the interview I heard it at a club and nearly went crazy. ‘Got Everything,’ by King Oliver.” He looked at her shrewdly. “That name means nothing to you, does it?”

She shook her head.

“I don’t remember the end of the interview. I woke up on the trolley going home. The next day I had to write something. My notebook was blank—all the questions I’d planned to ask and the notes I’d taken were gone. They’d probably torn the pages out.”

Molly nodded, encouraging him to continue.

“Never took a drink again,” Dodd said. He sipped at his soda. “That Fentrice. Is she still alive?”

“Yes. She raised me.”

“That must have been something.”

“What do you mean?”

“She was a wild one. Smoking in public, wearing scanty clothing. Did you know there was a room at the Paramount where women would go to smoke, so the men wouldn’t see them? I got the feeling there was nothing Fentrice wouldn’t do.”

“Actually she’s very staid. She gardens, plays bridge. She doesn’t smoke at all.”

“Doesn’t she? Hell, I shouldn’t be surprised. What’s one more disguise to that family?”

“Disguise?”

“That’s what I remember from that night. The show didn’t end when they left the stage. They put on another show just for me, for an audience of one. And your aunt did the same for you.”

“Why would she do that?”

“Why did they do anything? Why did they take my notes? I could have given them damn good publicity.”

“I think I know my aunt better than you do.”

“I don’t think anyone knew that woman. Well, maybe her family did.”

“I’m her family.”

“Right.” He drank. “And Thorne and Callan? What happened to them?”

“Callan died. I never heard of Thorne until yesterday.”

“Well. So they dumped their sister and she went off to live on her own. Raised a kid. Not the ending I would have guessed.”

“What I want to know, Mr. Dodd—are you sure Thorne was their sister? Couldn’t they have called themselves a family for the publicity?”

“They could have, I guess. But they all looked a hell of a lot alike. I wonder why she never told you about them.”

“So do I. Did a guy named John Stow call you?”

“No. Why?”

“He’s interested in my family for some reason. He’s the one who showed me the clipping in the
Tribune.
If he does call, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell him anything.”

“Like I said, I don’t know anything to tell. Hey, maybe I can help you look into things. I haven’t done any reporting in a long time.”

“Maybe,” Molly said.

“Listen to her, so polite. And all the while she’s thinking, How do I get rid of this old man? The last thing I need is him tagging along.”

“I wasn’t—”

The door opened and a woman in a blue dress suit came in. Her hair was ivory-white, forming a soft cloud around her face, and she wore glasses which hung from a chain around her neck. She went over to Dodd and kissed him on the cheek.

“My wife, Bess,” Dodd said proudly. He smiled, deep lines scoring his face. “Married her the same year I did that interview, as a matter of fact.”

“Hello,” Bess Dodd said. She turned to her husband. “Carolyn and the kids dropped me off—she’s looking for a parking space.”

Kids? Molly thought. She had thought Dodd alone and friendless, an anonymous old man who spent his days watching television or sitting on a bus bench. “I should be going,” she said.

“All right,” Dodd said. “Let me know what happens.”

Molly took the elevator to the lobby. As she left the building she held the door open for a middle-aged woman, a younger woman, and two noisy children about five and nine. Grandkids and great-grandkids, she thought. Thinking of large families, she walked to her car and drove home.

TWO

The Drowned Cities of Atlantis

“D
o you want to go out for a drink?” Robin Ann asked Molly after work the next day.

“I shouldn’t,” Molly said. “What if—”

“Peter calls? I know. What if he does? That’s why God made answering machines.”

Molly and Robin Ann had come from the same temp agency. Molly liked Robin Ann, even though she usually ended up doing most of the other woman’s work. Instead of filing and typing Robin Ann spent hours gossiping, asking Molly questions, telling her about her boyfriends, her poetry—she had been published in several prestigious small magazines—her plans for the future. Twice in the year they had worked together Robin Ann had disappeared for several days. When she came back to work all she would say was that she had had one of her nervous breakdowns, casually, as though it were a recurrence of the flu.

“It’s just that I wasn’t home yesterday evening,” Molly said.

“Yeah?” Robin Ann waggled her eyebrows like Groucho Marx. “How come?”

“It’s not very interesting. Well, it is, but not in the way you think.”

“I think we’d better have a drink. I think you’re going to have to tell me all about it.”

“But if I’m not there he’ll probably call someone else.”

“When are you going to dump this loser?” Robin Ann asked.

Molly shook her head. She had tried, several times, to tell Robin Ann how she felt about Peter. How her heart pounded against her ribs like a monkey swinging against the bars of its cage whenever she heard his voice on the phone. How she would think, not once or twice but dozens of times a day,
Oh, I have to remember to tell Peter that,
sure that only Peter, of all the men in the world, would understand. How he even smelled different from everyone else, of airplanes and of shirts that had been professionally laundered because he was too busy to go to a laundromat and had never settled down long enough to buy a washing machine.

“Where is this paragon of virtue now?” Robin Ann asked.

“Las Vegas, I think. Interviewing some Mob boss.”

“Ah.”

Robin Ann even disapproved of the books Peter wrote. They were the kind that were rushed into paperback and sold in supermarkets, unauthorized biographies of troubled royal figures or wealthy men married to starlets.

If Molly tried she could remember a time when she had disapproved of them herself, back when she had first met Peter Myers through the temp agency and was typing his manuscripts. But it was getting harder and harder to keep things in perspective, to remember the person she used to be before Peter. In the ten years since she had dropped out of college she had traveled through the United States, had taken temp jobs to pay for her moves from state to state; she had been a clerk in a toy store and a cab driver, had worked in a fish-packing plant in Alaska. How had she ended up like one of those pathetic women she had met in her travels, the ones who did nothing but stay home and wait for the phone to ring? But she could not seem to break away from him; she felt that if she stayed she was being faithful to love, and that if she remained constant through all obstacles he would someday understand, and become faithful too.

“Forget Peter,” Robin Ann said. “It’ll be good for him if you’re not home once in a while.”

“Maybe.”

“Definitely. Tell me where you were last night.”

Molly laughed. “There’s this guy,” she said. “A private investigator.”

“Great,” Robin Ann said, impressed.

“No, it’s not like that. He’s kind of a jerk, really. He keeps asking me questions about my family.”

“What kind of questions?”

“Who they were. What they did. What happened to one of them, a woman he claims was related to us. I never heard of her.”

“Did you ask your aunt?”

“Yeah. She said not to answer his questions.”

“Sounds like she has something to hide.”

“Don’t you start. He thinks this woman was murdered. Murdered—I ask you. Who would murder her?”

“Maybe you should visit your aunt. Find out what’s going on.”

“Yeah, I was thinking of that. Maybe I will.”

When Molly got home after drinks with Robin Ann there was a blinking light on her answering machine. She played the message back.

“Hey, Moll,” Peter said. She felt a rush of pure pleasure at the sound of his voice. “I’m in town, back at the hotel. Give me a call, maybe we’ll have dinner.”

She called his hotel, on Bush Street in San Francisco. No one answered. Who was he with now? No, better not to think of that. But all the names he had dropped so casually in conversation came back to her one by one, persistent as ghosts.

Dammit
, she thought.
Robin Ann’s right. I’m going to visit Fentrice. Let him see what it’s like when I’m not in town
.

She picked up the phone again and made reservations.

In her black dress and necklace of large amber beads Fentrice stood out easily from the more colorful crowd at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. They hugged, and Molly smelled her aunt’s familiar odors of perfumed soap and crinoline.

“Let me look at you,” Fentrice said, holding her at arm’s length. She wore a bracelet of onyx and tarnished silver; it had turned her wrist a little blackish-green. “I must say California agrees with you.”

“How have you been?” Molly asked.

“Fine. Do you have any other luggage?”

“Just this.”

“Good. Lila’s waiting in the car.”

They walked down the long airport corridor, Molly slowing as Fentrice began to lag behind. The familiar black Oldsmobile stood at the curb; Fentrice had had it for as long as Molly could remember. When Molly had gone away to college she had been amazed at how often people changed cars.

Chicago was far colder than California. Molly shivered and drew her coat around her and got into the back seat. “How are you, Lila?” she asked.

Lila looked in the rearview mirror and nodded. Molly grinned; the housekeeper was as taciturn as ever. Lila lit a cigarette and pulled away from the curb.

Fentrice lived in a small town a few hours’ drive from Chicago. They talked about neutral subjects, Molly’s jobs, Fentrice’s garden. Now that she was finally here Molly found herself reluctant to ask questions. It was enough to be home, to be surrounded by the familiar sights and smells of home.

The road before them darkened. Lila switched on the headlights. Traffic had been heavy on the highway leading out of Chicago but was now starting to thin. Finally they left the highway; the streets here were narrow and tree-lined, their blackness relieved only by streetlamps and an occasional light or flickering television screen from the houses on either side.

Lila pulled into the driveway of Fentrice’s house. Fentrice unlocked the front door and held it open for Molly while the housekeeper drove the car into the garage.

“Are you hungry?” Fentrice asked.